I know a couple of relatives in my extended family who still do this job (along with other jobs), but my grandparents were mostly teachers in government schools. My mother is also a government school teacher, and my father just retired from being a doctor in government service a couple of months ago.

I have vague memory of one of my grandfathers wearing a janeu. I have not seen my father wearing it (ever?), but I think he had done the upanayanam ritual (the one where you start wearing the janeu) in his childhood. When I was about 15, my extended relatives were forcing me to do upanayanam. I didn’t particularly like my extended relatives. They were nosy and had ugly opinions about things. So, one could say that it was predetermined that I would refuse whatever they told me to do. I do not remember if I was already an atheist.

In any case, I refused steadfastly. They did try all kinds of tricks like “You don’t have to wear it forever, just during the ritual”, “You don’t have to follow any daily rituals afterwards”, “Just get it done along with everyone else”, etc. I managed to escape. And my brother who must have been 10 then also managed to escape by pointing at me.

I remember that my father would be on my side. He would, after all, not care much about these rituals. He would give us (me and my brother) non-vegetarian food whenever we went out. He was also the one who infused a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of irreverence towards authorities by then.

But I was also open-minded. I would join the meetings of these caste welfare groups, listen to their boring speeches, engage in cultural events, serve food, and generally participate in such programs. I was even the Kannur district (or north Kerala) convenor of their youth group, and one of the early blogs I had built on blogger.com was for the Mattanur division of SPSS (a welfare group for these pushpaka caste communities).

The logic of casteist thinking

As an atheist, the scripture based explanations of caste superiority didn’t make any sense to me. But that didn’t prevent my family members from giving me other explanations like “the superiority comes from waking up early and saying mantras, eating only food with good qualities, and other such superior lifestyle”. My maternal grandmother is an expert at such “logic” in that whenever she’s questioned on her casteist hatred for other people, she comes back with such reasons.

Fortunately, I had, by then, also developed a sense of rationalism which prevented these pseudo-scientific explanations from having an effect on me. But I have seen plenty of “smart” individuals fall for these.

Regardless of whether one starts believing in caste because of religious scriptures (karma and similar non-sense) or a “modern” rationalization like a superior lifestyle, the result is a sense of superiority. (Or vice versa for those who believe they are in the “lower” castes).

Atheism is Not Enough

Many anti-caste activists think that religion is the basis for caste and that annihilation of religion is important for annihilation of caste. I agree with them. But I also think that it is not just religion that needs to go, but also irrationality.

Rationalism is distinct from atheism. Atheism is only concerned with opposing god and religion. Being an atheist doesn’t make one a rationalist by default. Rationalism requires the adoption of a scientific mindset. It requires that one be aware of cognitive biases and develop meta-cognition. It requires one to think hard and long about every topic and be aware of knowledge gaps. If atheism is skepticism towards religion, rationalism is skepticism towards everything, including one’s own capacity to know the truth.

How caste prejudices operate

As I would learn to observe later, casteist activities operate in two (three) interconnected levels in these families:

• The cultural level which includes rituals, vegetarianism, application of chandanam (sandalwood), organizing on the basis of caste, marriages within the caste, etc.
• The conscious psychological level which includes thinking lowly of others, sense of superiority, purity, and other “good qualities”.
• The unconscious psychological level which includes unconscious patterns of behavior, including some developed by mirroring other people’s casteist behavior, like the desire to be flawless, the confidence/arrogance of being right and needing to teach others, savior complex, righteous aggression, automatically giving respect and reverence to people who look/speak/write a certain way, domination/authoritarianism, self-centering, self-victimization. (Do note that some of these could be conscious as well).

While it is the cultural stuff which are more obvious, it is the psychological stuff which show up as prejudices. It is well documented today how casteist thinking is at the root of different kinds of violence seen in “sophisticated” spaces like academia, healthcare, policy making, and other urban elite spaces.

The cultural stuff form the conscious/unconscious rationalization for the psychological stuff. And in turn, those who are psychologically hooked on caste propagate the culture further in caste communities.

Some examples of these prejudices I have heard in my childhood

• those who recite gayatri mantra every day morning has a distinct sheen on their face
• brahmins are extremely intelligent
• those people are not good because they eat meat/have different culture (especially during conversations around inter-caste marriage)
• eating sattvaguna food makes one smart / eating tamoguna food makes one not smart
• waking up at 4am and doing prayers increases one’s concentration and consequently intelligence
• brahmins inherit great genes
• reservation takes away chances for “forward caste” students

Social pressure

Till I was 8 or so my parents and I lived away from any of my other family members. I used to spend a lot of time with neighbors from different religions and castes.

After that we moved to a neighborhood which was populated by my extended family, including my grandmother. And that’s when/where the pressure to adopt the caste and religious identity really started.

The pre-teen me could simply remain playing and not hearing the instructions given to me. When I became a teenager, I could “talk back” and maintain distance.

But I was also lucky in that my father was on my side. Even when my mom would ask me to go to temple or light the lamp, I could refuse easily. And thanks to patriarchy, my mother’s wishes could be easily overridden by my father.

This extended to my grandmother too. There was no undue pressure on me to show fake respect to my grandmother. And consequently whenever she made a fuss about non-vegetarian food at home, etc I could simply tease her and ignore her.

In some ways, it was the extended family which had more power. It wasn’t as easy to be rude with them. But the times where it was required was very few too.

Erasures

As I write this post, I have come to a realization. Perhaps, more than what was taught, it was what was missed that made my family casteist. The erasure speaks more loudly.

Topics that I never heard about from my family (except rarely my dad) includes:

• social justice, anti-caste movement
• politics beyond party politics
• Dr BR Ambedkar, Jyotiba Phule, Periyar, Narayana Guru, Sahodaran Ayyappan, and other anti-caste scholars
• rationalism, liberty, fraternity, equality, constitutional morality
• privilege

Parting words

In this post, I’ve tried to remember as much relevant pieces of information as I can within the time limits I set myself. If I find things I missed, I’ll make another post. I have written about my privileges in a separate post and therefore it needn’t be repeated here.

It goes without saying that regardless of how much of the cultural and conscious casteism I get rid of, the unconscious parts would still be lurking in me, until I discover them (through help from my friends or others) and work for years unlearning them. Feel free to send me a message if you find something!

I also wish to say that I do not claim that my experience is generalizable. There maybe parts of it which are applicable to others (or not). The way I have analyzed/categorized things maybe useful to you (or not). Use it merely as ethnographic material for your own critical thinking.

I asked them what rice items they had. They told fried rice, jeera rice, puliogre, and some other items. I heard “fried rice” and couldn’t imagine eating a vegetarian fried rice. After knocking over and repositioning the uddin vada plate on display, I left Panjuruli. As I stepped out, I walked unconsciously towards 404 Nectar, the salads and pasta place that Swathi and I frequent. But by then the idea of eating some chicken had taken hold of my brain. I decided to move to Arbn Food shawarma place and headed back to the road with JCBs.

My first step onto the road, some liquid fell on my left hand. It didn’t smell or look like crow shit. Maybe just some water from the metro station. And then there were many drops falling all around. It rained yesterday too. Must be a drizzle. I decided to brave it and reach Arbn Food before it started becoming heavier.

It did become quite windy very quickly. Arbn Food had its lights off. I was afraid that they were affected by the LPG crisis. But they were open. As I ordered a ₹140 jumbo shawarma roll, the rain had become quite thick. Arbn Food has a few seats on the roadside for people to sit and eat. I was standing under the retractable awning that extended just a couple of feet off the building. There’s no space inside. But the person making shawarma asked me to come inside and sit as it was raining. I said chalega and stood outside looking at the rain.

The rain had become quite heavy when the shawarma reached my hands. Two people who were waiting for grilled chicken on the seats outside ran to a nearby shop as the large umbrella couldn’t stop the rain drops that were carried horizontally by the wind. Intermittently, the wind brought some rain drops to me and my shawarma too. But I was eating it so quickly that there was no time for the drops to settle in on my shawarma. As I finished spreading mayonnaise all over my fingers and making the butter paper and tissue paper become one, the shawarma came to an end. I washed my hands with the water falling from the awning. Then I walked into the rain to throw the paper waste into the dustbin.

Apsara ice-creams was right around the corner. I walked on the footsteps of shops and reached there. As I turned the corner I could hear loud sounds on tin sheets. I thought some building under construction was falling down. But on the synthetic green carpet in front of Apsara, I saw that there was ice falling. Not snow. Ice. There were many pieces of ice falling. They were round and smaller than the CR2032 coin battery that we bought today morning from MK Retail, for our weighing machine, along with a tawa that supported induction stove, grated coconut, bread, eggs, kadala, avalakki, and goodday milk.

I went inside and there were three friends having ice cream. I ordered a small cup of strawberry cheesecake. And I finished it while watching the three friends get up and order another round of ice creams. They got jackfruit and chickoo. I thought about getting a second cup. Maybe tender coconut? No. I could instead have juice from Kundapura juice center.

I paid ₹90 and sat on one of the chairs outside waiting for the rain to stop. I sent a video of the ice — which was still falling — to Shan Geoites. That’s the Telegram group with Savi, Akash, Swathi, and I. The group is named after the YouTuber who taught us how to make kadala curry.

Once the rain stopped enough, I reached Kundapura, carefully protecting my foot from stepping in the rivers on both sides of the road. The person there cheerily greeted me. I returned the greeting and started looking at the menu plastered from top to bottom of the two pillars of the shop. I decided to have an apple milk shake. The people staffing Kundapura were scrambling around and I gave my order to another person now.

As I turned around I could see the scrambling was related to draining the water on the roadside. One of the staff had gone with a long pipe to the road trying to re-open the entrance to the stormwater drain. Another person came with a cement shaping trowel and started giving instructions to the person with the pipe. After lot of shoveling with the pipe, they succeeded in getting some movement. By then I had finished my apple milk shake, paid ₹65 and started moving towards home.

As I reached the bakery adjacent to Kundapura, the one where we always have egg puffs, some commotion developed there too. A lizard jumped from the shop front onto two people who stood eating something. They jumped and the lizard ran to the nearest pole. Turns out the pole was another person’s pants. I had seen the lizard moving towards this person who was calmly eating what I imagine was a samosa. I took a couple of quick steps to reach the other side of this person and pointed my finger straight at the lizard which had now reached their knee.

They asked me, “What’s it?”

I said, “There!”

“What?”

“Lizard!”

And they jumped too. And the lizard got off. And I walked away. A local dog with a pitbull’s face that was split evenly into grey (green?) and white looked at me from in front of the insurance company’s door.

After managing to not step into any puddles till then I planted my left foot firmly into the puddle that presented to myself as a firm piece of land at the corner between Old Madras Road and Double Road. Maybe I wouldn’t have made that mistake if I wasn’t looking at all the people waiting for catching long distance buses at the petrol pump there and then looking at my watch to confirm if it was indeed Wednesday or it had become a Friday already.

Emboldened by that misstep I decided to walk on the pavement to the side of Old Madras Road towards my home. Halfway into that, I had the opportunity to play Takeshi’s Castle as the pavement was filled with water and the road was filled with water and the only dry space was the edge of the pavement where the bricks were laid vertically. I tested my balance twice on this segment and when I saw that the buses were throwing water to the side on the road ahead, I decided to cross half the road and walk on the median. The median was wider but it ended into tall dividers soon. At that point I could cross the rest of the half of the road, reach the dry-er pavement on the other side, and finally reach the path to home where I would be writing this post.

Yesterday I saw a few eye-opening posts on Instagram.

In one Ahmad Abdallah was saying how we need to ask people for help to be able to build community. How we need to inconvenience each other so that we could become connected to each other like in a village.

In the second one Christabel Mintah-Galloway says how not everyone might be in a position to build a deep relationship and how that is okay. And how we shouldn’t confuse shared politics with genuine relationships.

In the third one Niké Aurea says how we shouldn’t expect people to guess what we need and get hurt when we don’t get it, about how we need to communicate and create clarity.

In the fourth one Avi Gill says how making it obvious to people how much you love them is amazing.

In the past week I was feeling very sad about my friendships. I felt like I had made friends who had little reason to like me as a friend. I felt like I had friends who didn’t give much space for me — to express myself, to talk about things I cared about, or to give me what I needed to feel loved.

But it was also true that I had never communicated to these friends with clarity what I wanted. I had been enjoying getting hurt.

It was overwhelming.

But it was also an opportunity for me to grow.

The reason I hadn’t had lunch today is that I had gone to Freedom Park for the protest against The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026. Swathi and I had left together from home. We took the metro from Indiranagar and I got down at Central College metro station while Swathi continued to Jayanagar. She was giving a talk about research and activism at the Institute of Public Health, Bengaluru.

I was supposed to eat something near the protest site. But by the time I reached it was 2:50. And a lot of people had come. And the protest started without much delay.

I met and greeted 18 friends there including Shubhangani and Zayan.

Vaishali put me in the speakers list for the protest. I prepared something while listening to others speak. It was something like this (jotted down from memory, could be totally exaggerated):

As a doctor, it is ironic that I’m standing in this venue to speak. The medical and healthcare system has been the most violent to many of the people assembled here. On behalf of the healthcare system, I apologize to everyone here who has faced violence or are scared to approach healthcare.
Even among that violent medical field, there are rays of progressive elements who have come together to develop a correct understanding of gender identity, sexual orientation, and all of that. The WPATH guidelines state that “An individual’s gender identity is an internal identification and experience”. So even science has learned and corrected itself. But none of that has reached our political class.

Now they’re talking about medical board. But let me ask, is there any test to determine a person’s gender identity? There’s none. Doctors have to eventually ask the person about their gender identity. There’s absolutely no role for doctors in this bill.

I do not understand why doctors are not standing up against this bill. Why are the medical associations not releasing statements?

All of the progressive public health groups in Karnataka and India are opposed to this bill. Saravatrika Arogya Andolana, Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, everyone is opposed to it.

This bill is unscientific. It makes no sense. It is anti-public health. It is anti-social justice. And that is what makes it a manuvadi bill.

Oppose this bill.

In school I had no problem giving speeches. But of late, I shake when speaking. The politically correct streak of activism has made me less confident about speaking, especially about social justice. Who am I to speak? Do I have lived experience? Shouldn’t I be passing the mic? Also what words do I use? Can I say “jai bhim”? Too many questions come when I take the mic.

But I tell myself “it is not about me”. If I can speak from a medical perspective or a public health perspective, that has some effect. Indeed, today, after I spoke, it became like “lawyers have spoken, doctors have spoken, everyone is against the bill”. So I felt I did the right thing by just straight up saying “ok” and speaking when called up.

The moment Zayan saw me afterwards, he said I spoke well. That’s when I stopped shaking. Later Apeksha too told me that I spoke well.

Although the permission was till 5, the protest went on till 6. And that’s when I took the metro to Indiranagar.

Around noon today, I broke the rule I set up for my own safety and entered a debate in a WhatsApp group. It was again modern medicine vs traditional medicine. Since I spent weeks discussing this in mfc e-group, I feel responsible to share a summary of my findings whenever this topic comes up anywhere. It’s another of the self-inflicted torture I take on.

As if by karma, when I got out of the underground metro station at Central College and reached network coverage, my WhatsApp crashed with all the messages. The database got corrupted. I could restore history from a backup from February 26. It cleanly erased all messages between then and today. Amazing.

I wanted to put a status telling people about this. I thought of writing “I can’t hold you accountable for things you’ve messaged me because I lost my whatsapp history”.

But then I put “Lost my whatsapp chat history. So feel free to resend all the “I love you” messages.”

Love requires space. Love requires space for mistakes. Love requires space for alternative truths. Love requires space for growth. Love requires space for negative emotions. Love requires space for difficult conversations. Love requires space for inconveniences.

Almost four years after I started exploring the framework of love, I’m finally beginning to understand the basics of love.

Not everyone is blessed with the curse of the search. It might be related to one’s privileges, exposures, childhood, or other factors. In any case, if you are someone who’s affected by the search, you might try the following:

• reading more books
• talking to and asking questions to more people
• working in various different groups and careers

The method

People doing the search may start from different places, but they converge on one method — the action-reflection cycle. Here’s what an action reflection-cycle looks like:

1. You may have done something.
2. You think about it and evaluate whether you have what you wanted.
3. You do something differently based on your thoughts above.
4. Go to step 1.

Depending on who you are there are two outcomes possible.

The search that ends

After a bit of exploring you will find some work that fits your hole perfectly. You will enjoy doing it, you will find meaning, you will get satisfaction, you will probably be able to make money too.

Some people call this ikigai.

The search that never ends

When you have finished reading all the bestsellers and the most obscure book that you found a dusty copy of in an old library, when you have finished talking to the last person on earth, and when you have said no to all the groups that you could easily have made a career in, if you are in this unlucky group, you’ll eventually come to the conclusion that there is no end to the search.

Because your search can only end when all of the world’s problems are solved. And they never can be.

So you’ll keep going through the action-reflection cycle (probably doing better and better each time). And then one day you die.

This post was written inspired by a discussion with Avani and Gayatri on a similar topic.

It is easy to find people frustrated with progressive spaces. But there are two kinds. One has the not doing the right way frustration. The other has the not doing the right thing frustration.

Not doing the right way

These are frustrations related to procedure and process. It is related to interpersonal interactions.

How do we organize? How do we make decisions?

Are we hypocrites? Do we speak one thing and do another thing? Do we talk about empathy and act mean? Do we talk about care and love and actively exclude people?

Are we going too fast? Too slow? Are there too many meetings? Too little?

Are we creating a safe space? Do we disagree productively? Are we on point? Do we have integrity? Do we care about the cause?

Not doing the right thing

This is a frustration with the whole space and the work itself. There is some fundamental disagreement with the cause or the proposed path.

Should we focus on action or discussion?

Should we focus on patriarchy? Caste? Class? Everything?

Should we have a narrower focus or a broader focus?

Should we focus on the problem? Or the cause of the problem? Or the cause of the cause? Or the cause of the cause of the cause?

Should we mobilize large political movements? Or should we strategically engage as a small group?

Should we be online? Or on the streets? Or both?

The overlap

There is some overlap at the edges. For example, questions of governance are tied both to what gets done and how it gets done.

There are also inter-dependency. How the work is done affects what gets done. And what needs to get done can create ripples in how it is done.

The implication for frustration

If you are frustrated about the way things are done, your frustration is about individuals and their ways of working. You might get insights from psychology (individual and organizational), culture, or just by peeking deep inside yourself. If you can’t find answers in one progressive space, you might be able to find/build a different space with the same goals. A different community that have figured out the how.

But if you are frustrated about what things are done, your frustration is about institutions and the paradigm of what counts as meaningful work. Your insights will come from fields like politics and social development. And your alternatives will be in a totally different paradigm of work.

This post was written inspired by a discussion with Gayatri and Avani on a similar topic.

While traditions like gender roles and stereotypes have been critically recognized for decades, there are some traditions which have been problematized very little and consequently go on unquestioned. These include:

• Universities are assumed to be the only spaces for thought and only the work of people affiliated to universities are deemed to be scholarship.
• Rich folks who donate to charity are given gratitude.
• Founders of organizations are regarded as crucial and the sole cause for everything and everyone that comes out of the organization (or even movements related to the organization).
• Taking advantage of one’s social capital is done without thinking twice.
• Famous people are assumed to be smart, fame is considered as proof of one’s ideas.
• Doing jobs inside capitalistic systems, perpetuating oppression, without attempting to find alternatives is considered acceptable.

How Irreverence Works

Irreverence is a thumb rule that works against many traditions.

Irreverence to elders in the family helps you fight patriarchy, caste, communalism.

Irreverence to the rich helps you fight capitalism, charity mindset, and savior complex.

Irreverence to the cultural elites helps you fight caste.

Irreverence helps you break toxic patterns of traditionalism, pause, reflect, and come up with alternative ways of doing things.

Without irreverence, you end up doing the same shit that others have been doing forever. Without irreverence, you end up being traditional.

Traditional forces in progressive spaces

In this reel Ravikant Kisana tries to explain how RK wants to disrupt the legacy of prestige by not talking about famous alma maters.

RK is fighting what’s called “name-dropping”. Name-dropping is an incredibly effective tool for influencing traditionalist mindset. You talk about how you’re friends with the rich-and-powerful, or connected to powerful institutions, and the traditionalist reverence will shower you with high esteem.

On the other hand, RK is accumulating another kind of traditionalist source of power in terms of algorithmic visibility. This is what prompts this tweeter to ask why Anand Teltumbde doesn’t get the kind of visibility RK or Suraj Yengde gets.

The traditionalist forces are nauseatingly obvious once you start seeing it, and it is also depressing to have majority of the population not see it. For example, in this widely shared post by Janaki Nair about Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid, all I could read was “JNU so great. Scholarship and debate so great in JNU. I’m teacher, SI and UK are simple students. Just recognize how great academics is and release them from prison.” One line stood out:

I was often irritated by their style of learning, which bordered on the irreverent.

The traditionalist thoughts that JN wrote throughout the post becomes explicit in this line. Irreverence is seen as an undesirable annoyance.

Develop Irreverence

Just like you say “fuck you” to 19th century notions of gender and Before-Christ notions of caste, start saying “fuck you” to things like:

• Money power
• Authority power
• Degree power
• Pedigree power
• Fame power

Re-evaluate things that you’ve been doing without questioning. And start operating on your own, based on your rationality and care.

There are two parallel forces which will work hand-in-hand to make this happen. On one side there will be the big money led NDA/BJP government. On the other side there will be the big money led private equity firms, Indian (like Reliance) or multi-national capital funds.

2026

Big money led government: Make ABHA ID mandatory for all hospital visits, lab investigations, and prescriptions as part of a digital push under the buzzword of AI. Start maligning NHM as a waste of money.

Big money led private equity: Consolidate acquisition of large hospitals and expand medical tourism packages in large hospitals. Start expansion into acquiring medium and small hospitals (clinics, nursing homes, smaller cities). Build software that will power hospital systems across and sell it under the buzzword of scale. Lobby for government to handover primary care to private sector under the garb of universal health coverage.

2027

Big money led government: Shut down NHM and make AB-PMJAY the only component of health. Outsource primary care through “strategic purchasing” to private players. Tenders at district level making it accessible only to very big hospital chains.

Big money led private equity: Grow small hospital networks aggressively, dangle big suitcases full of money to convince even the skeptical doctors to become part of the hospital chain. Build different models like franchisee, outlet, network to ensure wide coverage. Bid for districts and take over entire government healthcare machinery in the district. Keep cost to consumer low and even more attractive than alternatives (use financial reserves and government funded insurance to achieve this).

2028

Big money led government: Expand AB-PMJAY to the whole population with co-payment and bring convergence of all insurance schemes. Build a national database/platform for healthcare/insurance settlements that’ll be privately owned like NPCI and will operate outside the ABDM data framework. Aim to privatize all district hospitals and medical colleges, at least partially.

Big money led private equity: Wipe out all competition through huge acquisitions, predatory pricing, regulatory capture, and services like AI-enabled care delivery or robotics. Tie up with major AI providers of the time in huge deals that cannot be made by smaller players. Even the last remaining standouts should feel stupid not to join the hospital chains. Start differential pricing schemes based on insurance co-payment premium. Start cost cutting measures like shutting down low-performing assets, mergers.

2029

Big money led government: Election year. Open up the insurance platform itself to capital investment and advertise it as revolutionizing healthcare. Use 360° surveillance to increase premium costs for “bad” citizens. Deny insurance coverage to communities labeled hostile.

Big money led private equity: Increase prices drastically. Increase barriers faced by uninsured, even if they’re rich. Decrease salaries to staff, increase their targets. Prepare to offer exit for investors.

2030

Big money led government: Say we’re helpless.

Big money led private equity: Say we’re helping.

Academia: Publish “A study on developing a framework to evaluate the impact of third party payment systems on universal health coverage”

People: Sell both kidneys.

I saw injustice being meted out by the system today.

I decided to stand up against it.

I was thrown out of the system.

Many feminists openly say “I don’t want you to respond, just listen” in a similar sense. When people are talking about a problem, it is easy for some people to respond with “Hey, have you tried …?”, “Oh, you know what you should do?”, “This is just a problem of ….” and so on.

While this can be seen as a trend of mansplaining, this instant “fix” responses can be seen in other contexts too.

One that I often see is within academic spaces. When people who have been working on some problem for years to decades share a challenge (or even just talk about their work), I’ve seen them getting responses like:

• “Hey, I know this person who has done similar work, have you seen their work, maybe you can learn from them. Should I put you in touch?”
• “Hey, there was this fantastic paper I read about this, are you aware of it?”
• “Here’s my paper from 10 years ago that talks about this issue”
• “You should write about this”

It is difficult to problematize these instant fixes, yet I’ll try to do so.

The problems with these instant fix responses are:

1. It ignores the work they’ve already put in and the experience they have already gained.
2. It ignores the difficulty and complexity of the problem and how it takes hard, committed work to solve.

Patronization through unsolicited wisdom sharing

This maybe easier to contextualize. The experience people have is overlooked in all kinds of situations.

Recently I attended a meeting of health activists where someone spent a whole day teaching (literally teaching) the activists what right to health means!

Workshop facilitators ignore participant experience.

Doctors ignore patient experience.

Researchers ignore experience of those being studied.

Men ignore women’s experience.

Seniors ignore juniors’ experience.

Employers ignore employee experience.

And so on…

A lot of human beings operate from a sense of hierarchy and self-centeredness when it comes to knowledge. They see existing only their own knowledge (however limited it maybe), assume that others lack it (especially when they are lower in hierarchy in some way or the other) and try to share wisdom.

Disrespecting the struggle

A lot of problems are hard. Hard problems are a struggle to solve. When people are struggling through such problems what they need is solidarity. And offering them the loose end of a random thread is not solidarity.

If you want to get down to business and struggle together, please do! But if all you intend to do is a 30 second “fix” response, then you are being incredibly disrespectful of the process.

What you could probably do instead

Do what’s needed. Sometimes people need empathy, sometimes validation, sometimes understanding, sometimes insights, sometimes help, sometimes solutions, sometimes fixes, sometimes just a shoulder. If there’s space to, ask people what they need. Operate through a relationship. And do what’s the best. If possible.

The first time someone talks about their mental health issue(s), people are incredibly supportive. They are like “Incredibly brave of you to share this”, “Please reach out if you need anything”, “How can I help you?”, “Sure, take your time!”

But this support and solidarity doesn’t last long.

Once the novelty wears off, the support ends too.

By the time the mental health reason comes up the third or fourth time, people start getting tired of it, it will start getting framed as an “excuse”, and the person with the issue will start getting considered as crazy, lazy, unreliable, unproductive, etc.

Impatience with mental health

I think, maybe, people think of mental health issues like they think of cough or fever. They think that someone will have an issue for 3-4 days, and then they’ll not have it anymore.

That they ought to come out of it in a few days.

But mental health is complicated. It tends to be chronic. It tends to linger.

Sometimes people can present themselves in ways that make it appear like everything is fine.

And this creates even more impatience in others.

It is often forgotten that someone’s mental health issues can continue regardless of how they present, and how many times it has come up to the surface in the past.

One wouldn’t think of more visible disabilities like this

If I didn’t have my left thumb, you wouldn’t expect me to have grown a thumb the next time you see me.

If I am blind, you would not be surprised when the accommodations I need are recurring every time we meet.

You wouldn’t call it an excuse if I say no to an event because of a locomotor disability.

You would understand if I frequently have to reschedule, postpone, or cancel.

Depression, etc

Depression is probably the most common among the issues that gets this treatment (pun unintended). Someone says they’re feeling low and can’t follow-up on something and you go “again?!”

All chronic mental health issues would have to be in the list: anxiety, ADHD, autism, OCDs, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, PTSD, schizophrenia, psychosis, etc.

Even things that probably don’t get attention:

• Jealousy
• Low self-esteem
• Loneliness
• Grief
• Insecurity
• …

Don’t act like it is fixed

You can give a pep talk. You can give validation. You can be supportive. You can ask people to take a break. You can give them a vacation. You can connect them to a therapist. You can help them start a new exercise regimen and start cooking differently. There are so many things you might do or they might do themselves.

But sometimes these things don’t get “fixed”.

They will come back in different ways. Or in the same ways.

The expectation that it’s a one time thing has to go.

If you want to be truly supportive, you will have to be supportive more than once.

“People believe in god because there are things that frighten them beyond their control and the idea that someone is there to look after them gives them hope and stability”.

Growing up as an atheist, I’ve heard this argument from several people who wanted me to dial down my atheism. And it did work on me. In the past many years I’ve not been actively atheism-ing. Let people use whatever lucky charms they believe in, I thought.

But there’s a problem with this.

God doesn’t exist

God doesn’t exist. And I don’t mean in the atheistic sense that there is no proof of god’s existence. I mean in the philosophical sense that god as a concept doesn’t really exist in a well-defined form. The concept of god is ambiguous, vague, and for all practical purposes non-existent.

What does exist is the concept of religion.

Places of worship, rituals, prayers, holy books, priests. These exist.

And these define the rules of your engagement with the so-called god.

If they say you’ve to get up at 3 am and stand on your head to talk to god, you do that.

If they say your donation to god in INR should be proportionate to the size of the problem, you scale your donation.

You pronounce your god’s name as how they dictate it.

God doesn’t exist independent of religion. God is religion.

Independent gods are also non-existent

Then there are people who are like, “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual. My concept of god is as a higher power”.

Let’s call this the “independent god”. This god is not exactly defined by religion. But then what’s it defined by?

It’s defined by those individuals themselves. They decide the rules that this god follows, the frequency of reminders this god needs, what powers this god has, and so on. They define this god in whatever way they want.

Whether someone else defines the god for you, or you define the god for yourself, it is all imagination. And there’s a problem with imagination.

The limits of imagination

You can only imagine what you know!

Let’s say you are taking a test which you haven’t prepared for. For a question, you have to choose between answer A and answer B. You can pray to your imagined god for the strength to accept your fate, you can pray to your imagined god to forgive you for not preparing, but you can never pray to your imagined god for the answer.

Because your imaginary god is limited by your imagination and your knowledge.

You can’t imagine solutions to unsolved problems.

Why god is a bad therapist

And here’s where this becomes significant.

Imagine someone is going through a hard time in their life.

And they’re looking for answers.

And you present them with this imaginary god.

An imaginary god who doesn’t understand your specific situation, cannot know about what you’re going through, does not speak to you directly, and will not be able to answer you.

You’re essentially leaving them alone to solve it on their own.

God as a mental health tool is an incredibly alienating, confusing, and overall depressing tool that is also prone to being misused for exploitation.

If you try to lean on god’s shoulders, you’ll just fall down. Because god has no shoulders.

Do you need shoulders?

Let me address a criticism before you make it. There will be twenty people who read this and say “Oh Akshay, you’re an idiot, because I’ve used god as a crutch and it has worked for me”. To them my answer is: it’s not god, it’s you.

You have, through your life experience, figured out some ways to deal with emotions. And while you invoke god, you’re actually using your life skills. And it worked for you. Good!

But you might come across a situation which you do not have the skills for. And at that point your god crutch will fail.

And that is why it is important to have a proper, better solution like a good therapist or good friends. They have actual shoulders you can lean on.

Sometimes you don’t need more though. There are situations when you can figure things out on your own. It might be tempting to credit god in these situations.

Using god limits your growth

By giving all credit to god, you are undervaluing yourself. You fail to see your skills. More importantly, you fail to see your weaknesses.

By obfuscating the real source of your strength (you), you become ignorant of your own weaknesses.

If you label it right and identify yourself as the agent of your life, you will start seeing ways you can strengthen yourself. You will read, learn, explore, and grow. You will start using psychology, neuroscience, politics, sociology, history, and so many other fields of knowledge to deepen your soul. You will build friendships and other relationships that transform you in ways you couldn’t have predicted. You will find meaning and joy.

The broader harms of god’s shoulders

It’s not just that people can do better when they get rid of god. It’s that society can do better when it gets rid of god.

A lot of people are scared of a society without god. They say that science can ruin the world without morality. They implicitly assume that god gives them morality. And in turn they encourage religions. And the society ends up being under the control of unquestionable beliefs that form the basis of capitalism, caste, patriarchy and all the other harmful things we see today.

I see morality in science. I see morality in critical thinking.

I think the world would be much better off if we killed off religion and replaced it with making everyone think harder, question things, and be held responsible to think about morality on their own.

The delegation of morality and wisdom to god is the root of all problems.